On Monday, November 25th, Mariana Sameiro was a guest tutor for the communications pathway. I had just spent the weekend creating prints of my childhood home to explore the concept of building spaces in panels/to experiment further with lino-cutting techniques.
At the time, I was still debating between styles to explore to shake out some version of the story I am trying to tell of my brother and his particular flavor of autism using a variety of media. Mariana and I discussed the implications of print in narrative–particularly for the application of linocut. I had been experimenting with color in the stamps I had created up to this point, but we both agreed that the images were stronger in black and white. However, as images, perhaps they didn’t say enough. Perhaps it would be beneficial to apply print to the means of adding text to the images. Because the pressure and application of the linocut to paper is so linked to the physicality of autism/anxiety relief, it might be interesting to see if I could use a letter press to apply text underneath the high contrast images.
Mariana pointed me in the direction of some artists who had created graphic works using a similar printing process, namely Giulia Garbin’s ‘The Street of Ink,” which is a publication that strives to tell a non-linear story of Fleet Street, which was an area in London which represents a fallen history of the physicality of printing after the shift to digital print.
The publication itself is a collage of stories of this place with letterpress-printed text an linocut images, so the processes of recording the story are fundamentally linked to its subject matter.
The images and text are stunning, and the graphic contrast created by the linocut images creates a slightly haunting aesthetic for the story of this fading practice of printing. It is almost like a shadow of history, created by anachronistic means. The book’s link to the process is clear and powerful. It also shows the possibility of non-linear storytelling in print and the possibilities of design layout that are possible using linocut. The double spread above shows how Giulia took advantage of the high contrast to accentuate the perspective of looking down on the street, while establishing a slightly dark, whimsical tone based on the imperfections of the lines. The image is clean, yet imperfect, highlighting the bias of the human hand in this type of print media.
In this publication, Giulia plays with different scales in her graphic storytelling. This has inspired me to attempt to create larger, connecting compositions using the linocut stamps in juxtaposition with one another. It has also made me re-think exactly what I think a graphic novel is. To me, this is a graphic publication, but it is not a comic. I like this because there isn’t the visual repetition of a classic graphic novel that, for me, monotonizes some of the images in a story.
To push the idea of playing with scale and surprise, Mariana suggest that I continue working with lino, but maybe I could go even bigger. What if I carved lino floor tiles? What if I projected into space? There are lots of possibilities in the black and white.
RCA Graduate Diploma 